Top 100 Albums of the 1990s

Initially, the glacial textures conjured by guitarist Robin Guthrie on Heaven or Las Vegas may seem like frozen artifacts from a forgotten shoegazer past. But behind its icy exterior lies the album's beating heart-- a core of ungodly gorgeous songs that is every bit as moving and relevant today as it ever was. Elizabeth Fraser's vocal performance, more straightforward here than on any of the Cocteaus' 80s output, is strikingly nuanced, imbuing the record's haunting melodies with an entirely unique and entrancing character. The songs themselves are remarkably complex, weaving crisp electronic beats, monolithic synthesizers, effects-laden guitar, and Fraser's stately and angelic voice into a seamless sonic velour. --Matt LeMay

089: Squarepusher Music Is Rotted One Note [Warp; 1999]

Perhaps it was unexpected that one of the pioneering electronic music performers of the 1990s would produce a truly definitive post-rock album, but of course, Squarepusher has always been excitable. Tom Jenkinson's striking 1998 release bore more in common with Herbie Hancock's Headhunters than it did anything in his own catalog-- or, indeed, all of Warp's. The jazz fusion-informed bass figures on his previous albums only hinted at what must have been an extensive background in the genre, but this sound came to the fore on Music Is Rotted One Note, and did so with a vengeance. "Chunks" bursts out of the gate like a funky jungle cat, sounding like something ripped off the cutting room floor of Miles Davis' On the Corner sessions. "Don't Go Plastic" dropped the hyperspeed drums (also courtesy of Jenkinson) and vintage Fender Rhodes piano, applying extremely subtle electronic manipulations. One of the most obvious accomplishments of the record was its success in updating a model long since to have been perfected. However, it's the dark, hazy mood Squarepusher sustains that gives the album life. --Dominique Leone

088: Wilco Being There [Reprise; 1996]

Jeff Tweedy's first post-Uncle Tupelo venture began as all-around underwhelming substitute for hungry, belt-buckled alt-country fans: Wilco's humble debut, the twang-heavy country-pop offering A.M., contained virtually no hints of the band's potential for subtle sound-sketching. It wasn't until 1996's double-disc, the 19-track Being There, that Tweedy and company began tapping into the skittish, textured atmospherics that would-- nearly six years later-- secure them a fixed spot in the American canon. Being There is a notoriously inconsistent effort. Deeply ambitious, its missteps (see the overstated, Stones-lite faux-boogie of "Monday") were ultimately incapable of sullying the transcendence of its epic successes. Among those, opener "Misunderstood" pit 60s psychedelia (pinging strings, studio fuzz and unexpected splats of sound) against a sweet, spare piano melody, while "The Lonely 1" cemented the band's ability to eschew sentimentality without sacrificing warmth. Being There was Wilco's original coming-of-age, an occasionally awkward, ultimately profound transformation into something altogether new and beautiful. --Amanda Petrusich

087: GZA/Genius Liquid Swords [Geffen; 1995]

This blurb is coming to you live from a Wal-Mart laptop at my grandmother's funeral. GZA is bragging on a cassette I'm playing through headphones hooked up to a karaoke toy. The family curse is in full effect: My cousin's been hit by an SUV, my mom's boyfriend is wheelchair-bound after a fall at his junkyard, and four people in our party have contracted a virus, including the girlfriend I dragged along. Let's just say this tape befits a climate of localized terror. Too band the word "ultrasound" already has something to do with babies, because RZA's peak production deserves its own noun to encapsulate the tense beats and samples that dipped Cold Chillin' round-beat cartoonishness in Scorsese dread-mospherics (a style Eminem lately lives to crib).

Liquid Swords was the rare Wu-Tang splinter project that didn't feel like a footnote to 36 Chambers : The songs seem driven by bassists, hit more like metal than funk, and are strewn with gangsta detritus (rough neighborhoods, bitch cops, doomed children). The album's hosts are impolitic enough to threaten that their challengers will go out like Brandon Lee and Pan Am Flight 103, breaking up their boasts with martial-arts dialogue about using older styles to avenge themselves. The bent, Bomb Squad-esque horns of "Living in the World Today" rank among hip-hop's most unnerving, while the retarded keyboards of "4th Chamber" and "Killah Hills 10304" are way sicker than they ought to be. The echoing ampitheatrics rock as scarily as they did when I first heard them, in the days before we judged music with our hard-earned modems: I was sweeping up pigeon shit in the attic of a indie record store shut down by a chain's emergence across the street when-- oh god, no. My cassette just snapped. --William Bowers

086: Destroyer City of Daughters [Triple Crown; 1998]

An acoustic guitar and some CB fuzz was all the yelpy brainball Daniel Bejar needed to join the untradition of songwriting greatness, hurling forth more political metaphors for love than early Songs: Ohia. Like the work of the Silver Jews' David Berman, the lyrics steal the often-awkward show: "The ties that blind us bind us." "Steeples don't hurt any more than they used to hurt." "Boys set fire to the seasons." "Impenitent brothers, sway to the song of a new heretical dawn." "Nothing does a body good like another body." "Maybe I know where to run/ Brother, I know where to hide." "I am a tastemaker and I kill things/ I am not a tastemaker and I kill things." "And Jennifer, your haltertop, a consecrated altar/ But I've run my hands and knees in shame there one too many times." "Outlandish schemes for the Andover dreams/ We've weaned ourselves off of and off of and off of." "You were so cruel, and it was her house." "Modern times, modern minds/ Signs, signs, everywhere, signs." "A pleasantry the blonde in you responded to." "I just finished the book, and some of it's true." "Go girlish down the aisle." Damn straight, darn tooting and dark purposes. --William Bowers

085: Massive Attack Blue Lines [Virgin; 1991]

In 1990, hip-hop was steadily winding its way into the mainstream, and aside from a handful of hardcore acts (Public Enemy, NWA), the genre was splitting into two camps-- creatively bankrupt pop-rap like Hammer and Kid N' Play, or softer, accessible edutainment like Tribe, LL and Brand Nubian-- neither of which were too appealing to those with subversive leanings. Needless to say, it was time for the Brits to bring some much-needed fog and terror. The first lines of "Safe from Harm" were like a smooth kick to the velveted head: "Midnight rockers/ City slickers/ Gunmen and maniacs"-- and this was one of the romantic songs! Massive Attack's amalgamation of vintage dub, ambient starkness, hip-hop beats, siren divas, and drawling, purring raps was the sound of the street, whether you were in an embrace in the park or a gunfight in the alley.

3D, Daddy G, and Mushroom packed all the talent of Bristol (including reggae superstar Horace Andy and a young anti-go-getter then known as Tricky Kid) into a cellar and drew up smoke. 3D and Daddy G invented stoned insouciance a year and a half before Snoop would debut on Dre's The Chronic, tossing off smooth antinomies and meandering stories at a slug's pace. And when they were conjoined to earthy strings, minimalist samples, and Shara Nelson's voice, it incontestably changed the world's perception of the resonance of rap. --Alex Linhardt

084: Company Flow Funcrusher Plus [Rawkus; 1997]

It can safely be assumed that El-P is the only rapper who has ever listed Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and Terry Gilliam as his primary influences. As well as being one of the most prominent producers in underground hip-hop today, this is the kind of lyricist who calls himself a "sycophant" and other rappers "vainglorious." Yet, unlike many of the underground intelligentsia's other offerings on Rawkus, this ain't soft self-contemplation. El-P, Big Juss, and Mr. Len might know who Jackson Pollack is, but they also know his art looks a hell of a lot like splattered blood all over the park. On Funcrusher Plus, tales of molestation, murder, and assaults on capitalism were encapsulated in dense, smart, impenetrable lyrics without precedent, delivered at a fractured pace that required more listens than mortality will permit.

No one was prepared for the accompanying beats. As Big Juss puts says, they're "hardcore like Kool G Rap made for concert piano." Minimal percussion, piano and trumpet raise their heads over the walls of a police state. The beats are utterly disconcerting, like funk squeezed of their essence, popped into shells, and heard through dusty gramophones miles away. Purposefully defying anything remotely resembling mainstream sheen, the rhythms are sheer stuttering, shambling masterpieces, as sporadic and calamitous as gunshots. There was only one thing more dystopic and frightening this decade; I believe it was called the Zaire dictatorship. --Alex Linhardt

083: Pixies Trompe le Monde [4AD; 1991]

The surrealistic heights of Doolittle were never replicated, and by the time of Trompe le Monde, the Pixies' in-band squabbles had become common knowledge. Yet this still made a powerful finale, recasting the ingredients that had caused fans to fall so deeply in love with the Boston foursome in the first place. While somewhat skimpy with the dreamy vocal interplay of Frank Black and Kim Deal (when someone says "4AD," I still think of that ghostly echo), the best songs smoked regardless, boasting brilliant drums fills and scattershot rhythms, an unpredictable compositional sense, and Black's increasingly opaque lyricism. His words sounded sexy even when they didn't make much sense, and "U-Mass"' "Oh kiss me cunt/ Oh kiss me cock" remains one of rock 'n' roll's better come-ons. It was all in the chemistry, even when nobody was talking to one another. --Brandon Stosuy

082: Sonic Youth Goo [DGC; 1990]

After spending most of the 1980s flaunting their Branca-inspired free-form guitar squall, seminal noise-rockers Sonic Youth tumbled into the 90s with Goo, the largely anticipated (and comparably amiable) follow-up to 1988's groundbreaking Daydream Nation. The band's first album after switching to major DGC, Goo was a notoriously "transitional" record, with Sonic Youth cramming their feedback-heavy dissonance into a slightly more focused aesthetic and pushing memorable melodies without compromising their much-beloved contentiousness. By demanding full creative control and limited A&R capacities from the label, Sonic Youth unknowingly etched a successful template for future indie bands yearning for the double-dip of major-label distribution and indie-like sovereignty. --Amanda Petrusich

081: The Breeders Pod [4AD; 1990]

Pod is a blissful mindfuck of a record. Deal may have played coy and seductive throughout, but there was something subtly sinister to her cooing-- like a siren or a schoolgirl concealing a butcher knife, her methods of enticement immediately struck as inherently destructive. This dynamic was fully realized in the songs themselves, which came across like the product of a band caught in a constant cycle of self-destruction and rebirth. Sure, the songs were catchy-- frighteningly so, in fact-- but that just served to make them all the more poignant when they fall apart. Deal's tobacco-stained delivery and Steve Albini's sharp, make-up-free production make songs like "Oh", "Doe", and the unforgettable "Iris" are as oddly wrenching as they are outwardly pretty and well-constructed.

More than a decade later, this record remains deliciously inscrutable. Sometimes it's disarmingly gorgeous. Other times it's punishingly gritty and violent. Usually, it's both. Pod 's bipolar cover of "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" perfectly encapsulates the record as a whole-- whether Deal was playing it cool or tearing shit up, she seemed to be enjoying every second of it. --Matt LeMay